for the drabble thing! forsaken + holidays 👀

[Send me a fandom, pairing, or character + a one word prompt and I will write you a short drabble!]

They did not have anything like the Feast of Lights during their time.

It's the thought that keeps coming back to Lanfear as she wanders the streets. There had been public celebrations of course: events to mark important milestones and anniversaries, but those had usually meant some ostentatious new display of Aes Sedai wonder, and slight variations in the course of normal gatherings.

There had been nothing like this.

Lanterns strung up over head cast the city in a golden glow and people dance and sing publicly, in sometimes shocking ways. She sees so-called nobles stripped to the waist, comporting with so-called commoners in the same. She sees people handing out baked goods without any expectation of payment: mince pies and sweet rolls, and whole loaves of bread. Some of the richer nobles are followed through the throng by hordes retainers who happily pass rare delicacies like lemon cakes and, or other ostentatious displays of generosity like finely spun linens and braided copper bracelets. No one seems to notice or care that a week ago those same nobles would have spat on the people who delight in their kindness, and those who grasp for the alms would have hurled stones had they seen the noble to return such insults.

It's remarkable the way the tension that normally boils the city has drained away. Poverty is forgotten, the scars from the Aiel War are ignored, and the rigid divides that normally hold all the nation in a stranglehold aren't just relaxed, they are gone utterly. Lanfear watches a withered grey haired man who bothered her for a free drinks greet a man in silks so fine that would have impressed a little even in her age like an old friend and invite him to a game of stones. She lingers just long enough to hear them reminiscing about their lives in a way that makes it clear this is as annual as any other piece of the celebration.

Elsewhere people line up to devour puddings and dig out silver coins with different markings on them, holding them up to the delight of the crowd. A guard captain holds aloft The Fool and is glad to don a jester's hat to the raucous laughter of his underlings, while a butcher's daughter pulls The King and gleefully is swathed in a mock lion skin cape and given a wooden broad sword. When the last coin is named and the last prop is dispensed, the group starts of all things a march down the street, while the onlookers call out encouragement or demands for clemency from the 'King' or kisses from 'the Maiden' (a matronly palace servant whose worry lines have turned somehow into joyous thing as she blows kisses to the crowd).

Lanfear is sure that Balthamel could explain it all if he where: give her some explanation about social pressures and the barbarian psyche, how the role reversal games enforce social boundaries instead of break them down, how the joy masks some deeper unpleasantness. She almost wishes he would appear and do so even if she finds being spoken down to in that way unbearable these days. Anything to take her mind off the itchy angry feeling clawing around her ribs.

It wouldn't have to be Balthamel. Anyone who could cite sources and studies and cloak all these things in the layers of context that would let her remove herself from it, let her view it in the detached light of a scholar, show to her the underlying systems and strings that could confirm the artificiality of it all.

There had been nothing like this in her time. Because what would have been the point? There had been no tension to release, no inequality to make generosity meaningful, no barriers to make their lowering significant. She had never wandered the streets of a carnival like this, which means she had never known the kind of heady warmth in the air, defiant against ever encroaching cold. It makes a terrible feeling, a lesser cousin to what she had always felt seeing Lews with Illyena, twist inside her. It makes her imagine being a girl again- even as the thought of being that stupid and naive and so much more idiotically human makes her skin crawl- and marching forward with Joar (Asmodean. Asmodean. His name is-) to one side and Lews to the other. She can picture how she would have dragged them about with disgusting clarity and how she would have played at expert in things she barely understood herself to impress the pair in their ignorance. She stops short of trying to picture the gifts they would have exchanged. She makes herself stop, because she finds herself reaching out to the Source on instinct, to fire and rage at something denied her.

Barbarism. Savagery. As primitive as dancing naked around fires or worshiping wooden idols. That's all it is.

She tells herself that again and again as she makes her way back to the Inn, the only place in the Foregate not covered in lanterns and candles or roaring with music. Yet when she steps inside the near empty common room she feels a the sharp sting of absence, and when a woman who had been clearly waiting for service for more then an hour stands to ask if she is well, Lanfear feels her temper snap.

It isn't a painful death. It's far to quick for that, the woman's throat skull shattering instantly on impact.

It also makes Lanfear feel no better.